June Chit Chat

New Blog!

A few month’s ago, I started a new blog and it is all about food photography. I like to geek out about my collection of mismatched napkins, dishes, and talk about how to take a proper food photo. If that is something you’re interested in please check out Foodie Styling! I’ll be sharing all my tips and tricks and what I learn a long the way. I feel like in food photography, there’s ALWAYS something to learn. Please check out foodiestyling.com!

New Grill!

Believe it or not, I’ve never had a grill until now. Deryl my friend that I met online, bought me a grill for my birthday. It was probably one of the better birthday gifts that I got this year and so far I love it! Thanks D. Look at how shiny and new it looks. 🙂 In June I probably ended up grilling at least 3 times a week at night and sometimes during the day.

No more dairy 🙁

On my 37th birthday, my mom and I went to this new creamery downtown called Silver Lining Creamery. Before I turned 37, I had no issues with dairy what so ever. There was the occasional hacking after eating ice cream or frozen yogurt but never did I think anything of it. I might have googled why do I hack after eating ice cream a couple of times but I didn’t do anything about it. Silver Lining Creamery had some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had and that was that night I realized I’m either allergic to dairy or lactose intolerant. Over the past year, I’ve been really struggling with this and I was kind of in denial about it. The Doctor to me to try cutting it out of your diet for a couple of weeks.

In my quest to completely go dairy free, I’ve found products that I really enjoy. There are several different brands that make the bomb dairy free ice cream. My favorites are Ben and Jerry’s, So Delicious (their cashew milk ice cream), and Halo Top. For butter, there’s Earth Balance Vegan butter and for milk I now drink almond milk.

The only thing that I’m having a difficult time with is cheese. In June, I ordered a cheese-less pizza and I’m pretty sure the people who worked at Papa John’s were thinking that this person must be crazy ordering a cheese-less pizza. On reddit, there was a thread on there where some Vegans had talked about ordering a cheese free pizza online from Papa Johns, so I decided to give it a try. The pizza was ok minus the cheese. One day I even reheated the pizza with some dairy free cheese on top and it was just ok. The pizza was not the same. After not eating dairy for almost 2 weeks my stomach felt great and the dizziness also stopped.

As far as dairy recipes are concerned on this blog, I’m not going to go and replace any of the old recipes. I will still continue to make dairy recipes on this site but those will be limited from now on. If you see a post that has cheese on top, I probably took a Lactaid before eating it. 🙂 I’m thinking about adding dairy free substitutes to the notes recipe for dairy free people. My thought on this whole entire thing is to just eat less dairy and if you really want a pizza it’s ok to have every now and then. Just not every single day. 🙂